Commissioning of small field size radiosurgery cones in a 6-MV flattening filter-free beam

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the commissioning of small field size radiosurgery cones in a 6-MV flattening filter free (FFF) beam and report our measured values. Four radiosurgery cones of diameters 5, 10, 12.5, and 15¿mm supplied by Elekta Medical were commissioned in a 6-MV FFF beam from an Elekta Versa linear accelerator. The extraction of a reference signal for measuring small fields in scanning mode is challenging. A transmission chamber was attached to the lower part of the collimators and used for percentage depth dose (PDD) and profile measurements in scanning mode with a stereotactic diode. Tissue-maximum ratios (TMR) and output factors (OF) for all collimators were measured with a stereotactic diode (IBA). TMR and the OF for the largest collimator were also acquired on a polystyrene phantom with a microionization chamber of 0.016¿cm3 volume (PTW Freiburg PinPoint 3D). Measured TMR with diode and PinPoint microionization chamber agreed very well with differences smaller than 1% for depths below 20¿cm, except for the smaller collimator, for which differences were always smaller than 2%. Calculated TMR were significantly different (up to 7%) from measured TMR. OF measured with diode and chamber showed a difference of 3.5%. The use of a transmission chamber allowed the measurement of the small-field dosimetric properties with a simple setup. The commissioning of radiosurgery cones in FFF beams has been performed with essentially the same procedures and recommended ...